ACLU calls for FTC investigation into carrier Android

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a complaintPDF with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) concerning how AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, despite having sold millions of smartphones, fail to update their customised versions of Android to fix security vulnerabilities. "Android smartphones that do not receive regular, prompt security updates are defective and unreasonably dangerous", says the ACLU. It notes that there is widely distributed malware which takes advantage of vulnerabilities for which Google has fixes available, but those fixes have not made it to the "vast majority of consumer devices". Those consumers are also typically on postpaid contracts of two years and are locked into the devices which are not getting the updates they need